The first mystery convention I ever attended was Bouchercon XIV, held in New York in 1983. It happened to be a terrible season for the flu, and a lot of authors and attendees stayed home sick.

The big entertainment on Saturday night was supposed to be a magician who was going to cut a lady in half. Alas, he called in to report that the lady had the flu, so he would have to cancel. The convention management offered to find another woman he could cut in half but he assured them it wasn’t that simple.

This meant the management had to find someone who was willing and able to entertain several hundred mystery fans on a few hours notice. And boy, did they succeed. The word went out that the substitute would be another magician — the Amazing Randi.

Now I don’t know as much about magic as, say, our own beloved Steven Steinbock, but I did understand that this was somewhat like the waiter saying “We’re all out of hamburger. Would you settle for filet mignon at the same price?”

His new trick

James Randi was famous for his many appearances on TV, doing escapes from straight jackets and other stunts. But when he showed up on stage — a short, balding man, with a Rasputin-like beard — it turned out he wasn’t interested in doing magic. He had had a midlife crisis, you might say, and wanted to tell us about his new career plan.

Oh, he did some tricks, all right, mind-blowing impossible stunts. But that was just to show off his credentials, so to speak.

Randi explained that he had recently joined Mensa, the organization for the people with the highest IQs, and had been horrified to discover that they had interest groups for astrology, ESP, and other phenomena that we may sum up with the beloved term “woo-woo.” He couldn’t believe that some of the smartest people in the country could believe in such stuff.

So — long story short — he decided to dedicate the rest of his life to combating the spooky crowd.

He carried at all times a check for ten thousand dollars which was on offer to anyone who could perform a paranormal feat — including mind-reading, dowsing, spoon-bending, etc — under controlled conditions.

The check was a brilliant device. Randi was putting his money where his mouth was, and forcing the purveyors of woo-woo to answer the question: if you can do all the stuff you say you can do, why don’t you take the man’s money and shut him up?

But nobody did. (Now, as the magicians would say, keep your eye on that check. We’ll come back to it.)

Randi gets academic

The main thing Randi talked about that night was Project Alpha. I’ll summarize but you can read more here and here. Washington University in St. Louis, MO, had received half a million dollars to investigate paranormal phenomena. They decided to examine children and teenagers with telekinetic powers (i.e. spoon-benders).

Randi sent them an unsolicited list of helpful suggestions for dealing with human subjects. After all, test tubes don’t lie and rats don’t cheat, but people will try both. One of his suggestions was to have a professional conjurer on hand, since they are the experts on slight of hand. He even volunteered to participate.

Well, the experimenters decided they could get along without Randi. And they did. They found two star subjects, young men who could do remarkable things. And after they introduced them at a psychology conference Randi announced that they were magicians, trained and sent in by him. He also pointed out that if the experimenters had followed his list of suggestions, the boys would have been promptly caught.

As you can imagine, a lot of people were furious. Because of Randi, the half million dollars had been wasted! Randi replied that, since the tests had been proven unable to distinguish between real and phony psychics, the money would have been wasted in any circumstances.

A million on the line

Randi now heads the James Randi Educational Foundation. And remember that check for ten grand? Thanks to some anonymous donors it grew to a million dollars and has been on offer for almost ten years now. Randi has announced he is retiring the challenge as of next year because dealing with the type of people who think they can win by talking to the stars or predicting events that will happen next millennium (try to test that) is just too much trouble. So if you want to try for the money, sign up soon.

I want to end by going back to that night at Bouchercon. During the question period an audience member asked rather indignantly: “How do we know you aren’t using psychic powers to do those tricks we just saw?”

“You have to decide for yourself,” Randi told her. “Which is more likely: that I could violate the laws of thermodynamics, or that I could fool you?”

8 comments

But I like that he doesn’t fool around with hoaxers. When confronted with Occam’s razor, it’s astonishing how many people come down on the side of the paranormal instead of the simpler explanations in the physcial world.

I love pitting my wits against magicians, trying to figure out how they do it. In the recent television series which included Criss Angel and Uri Geller, I was able to deduce how most were done. The confrontation between Angel and Geller was frosting on the cake, Angel offering an award to prove a contestant and Geller were frauds.

I’ve forgotten the title of a book I read a couple of years ago, but the authoress revealed many of the frauds from the past. She found it astonishing that men of the 19th century refused to believe that women could hide objects in and around their bodies.

Ectoplasm? According to the author, ectoplasm was nothing more than wafts of gauze.

I loved this article. I don’t understand woo-woo and am intrigued Randi challenged and won. I have had people question me about something as simple as a piece of jewelry, asking if it have me peace. No, it matched the clothes.

I do like the term woo-woo. When someone asks a like question I’m gonna say, nope, this is my new woo-woo.

Back in The Scribbler on May 14, 2007, in an article defining several different subgenres of mystery fiction, I wrote the following:

“Woo-woo: investigation of a crime with supernatural elements, involving a psychic detective together with various appurtenances of the occult such as Tarot, channeling, astrology, etc. So-called because of the plaintive cries traditionally attributed to ghosts.”

So you see, “woo-woo” has a pretty specific meaning within the mystery community, like “hard-boiled” or “cozy”.

Yes, people will try both, usually for fun and profit — especially profit.

True, test tubes don’t volitionally attempt to deceive, since they possess no consciousness; the problems that arise usually — perhaps always — originate in the consciousnesses of the experimenters.

The unspoken assumption in the statement is that scientists, being practitioners of what we’re all indoctrinated throughout our school careers to believe is an infallible pursuit, don’t make mistakes or deliberately fudge their results — which they do with alarming frequency (grant money could be lost, prestige is at stake — you name it).

As for the rats: They’ve been known to climb over the walls of the maze, blithely ignoring their human tormentors and heading straight for the cheese.

Randi’s website triumphantly assaults Christians and their beliefs, dismissing them as unsophisticated ignoramuses, which seems consistent with his belief that since there is no God (an untestable hypothesis) he must be in possession of The Truth (for which he no doubt has his own uniquely satisfying definition).

Randi is correct in going after the New Age charlatans; in my opinion, he’s doing the right thing there, even if it’s for the wrong reasons.

Mike, your post is even more anti-scientific than Randi’s program is anti-religious—which, by the bye, is not a position which I accept uncritically, particularly by your characterization of it being “anti-Christian”.

Christianity is a very big tent, and it is not necessary to accept the claims of faith-healing televangelists and self-identified prophets—Randi’s targets—as dogmatic to be a true and faithful Christian. It is not necessary to believe in the Rapture or other fundamentalist doctrines. It is only necessary to believe in the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection—i.e., the Nicene Creed.

“After all, test tubes don’t lie and rats don’t cheat, but people will try both” is not merely “one-third accurate.” It is entirely accurate. In order to be “one-third accurate” it would have to be two-thirds inaccurate–but you concede that each clause is true. Your amplifications concerning scientific shenanigans does not alter the basic truth of the statement one bit.

Scientists who fudge their results—among whom there are suprisingly few, given how many scientists exist in the world, all of whom are under the same pressure to succeed as the rest of us—are always challenged and disgraced. (I concede that there are a few isolated cases where it has taken several years, but there is only one case I know of where proof of falsified data did not have any effect on the reputation of the scientist presenting them, and that’s the case of Gregor Mendel, a Christian priest and the father of genetics.) That is the purpose of peer review. Scientific claims are never considered validated until they have been independently reproduced. The incidence of quacks and confidence tricksters among faith-healers, however, is demonstrably very high.

And I’m sure you didn’t mean that “Randi’s website triumphantly assaults Christians”, since to triumph is to win.

For the very reasons Mike gave in his comment, above, I find myself one-third in awe of Randi and two-thirds scratching my head at his audacity.

(By the way, Randi has appeared in several episodes of Penn and Teller’s “BullSh!t,” which is an entertaining expose and frauds and phonies, but for the reasons I’ll state below, there’s a thin line between being skeptical and being pompously closed-minded).

I make no secret in this forum that I’m a religious man. That doesn’t mean that I believe in a great Santa Claus in the sky who watches over our every deed, monitering who is naughty and nice and who merits a place in heaven. It means that I am in awe of the beauty and order of the universe, and that I attribute the order and beauty to a transcendant force (I’m hearing echoes of Yoda) that desires ethical behavior of me. Neither science nor James Randi can prove or disprove that belief. That isn’t science’s job.

The purpose of science is to examine observable phenomena, to use “scientific method” of experimentation, and to hypothesize and theorize about how stuff happens. Religion doesn’t belong in science’s world any more than an ice cream sundae belongs on the breakfast plate. I like breakfast and I like ice cream sundaes, but taken together I get really sick.

As Mike hinted in his comment, it isn’t even science’s job to present Truth. When truth and science get squashed together, you end up with scientism, a form of insidious fundamentalism. Thirty years ago atmospheric scientists theorized that air pollution would lead to an ice age. Both Time and Newsweek published frightening articles about the coming ice age. Today scientist have theorized that air pollution (the hot-button label is now “Greenhouse Gasses”) are causing global warming. Pollution is bad stuff in any event, but I’m a little uneasy about the religious zeal with which my son’s science teacher asserted that Global Warming is a Fact and that in my son’s lifetime, the polar icecaps would disappear and Polar Bears would go extinct.

I’ve prattled overlong on this. I apologize. (The lack of scientific inquiry in my son’s science class irked me). I guess my point is that science deals only with the observable world, and it presents theories, and not Truths. I admire the scientific method Randi uses to test whacko claims, and how his work benefits would-be consumers of chicanery, but I find his zeal at ridiculing things that science hasn’t proven to be rather unscientific.

My above comment was written before JLW’s response to Mike Tooney. After reading JLW’s comment, I did a little reading on Randi’s website. I have to agree with JLW that Mike’s characterization of Randi’s website as
“anti-Christian” was a bit overstated, but it’s also clear that Randi gets pleasure ridiculing religion. In his “Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes” he refers to kabbalah (which he mistranslates as “collection”) as naive, he simplifies and makes fun of the Hindu concept of Kundalini, and simplistically mischaracterizes biblical prophecy.

Elsewhere, Randi explains that “inventing a deity greatly simplifies life for the believer, and makes thinking unnecessary” and that “Gods are children’s blankets that get carried over into adulthood.” Again, making it clear that he doesn’t want to take an honest look at real religion, but would rather make fun of religious caricatures.

I don’t want to belabor this point further (I enjoy the Criminal Brief blog too much to clutter it with extraneous religious/philosophical controversy), but I must respond to the assertion that my post was “anti-scientific”; it was anti-scientism (see below). You aren’t likely to find a non-scientist who is a greater advocate for science than I am. Real science is an honest attempt to ascertain the validity, through empirical verification, of facts (not truth, which is a metaphysical concept). Any idea that is not testable, repeatable, observable, and falsifiable, can’t be considered scientific; yet there seem to be a lot of people running around calling themselves scientists making all kinds of ridiculous assertions as if they were gospel (sorry about that) truth, even though what they say fails to meet any, some, or all of the criteria of testability, repeatability, observability, and falsifiability. The media uncritically accepts these pronouncements and promulgates them without challenging them; truly this is the apotheosis of the expert (the subject of a recent documentary film which was itself the subject of an attack piece on this blog).

Randi’s webpage assumes the theistic hypothesis has been thoroughly discredited — all the results are in, put the kiddies in the car, Margaret, it’s time to hit the road. There isn’t a hint of any humility there — that, hey, we COULD be wrong about all this so we humbly submit these views openly and honestly. Thus, when I used the carefully chosen term “triumphantly,” I wanted to convey the attitude of triumphalism that permeates Randi’s webpage.

It’s no surprise that Randi’s site explicity ridicules Christians (the whipping boys de siecle) and implicity criticizes any other groups that entertain the theistic hypothesis. His webpage is a gathering place for persons who advocate SCIENTISM:

“Scientism, in the strong sense, is the self-annihilating view that only scientific claims are meaningful, which is not a scientific claim and hence, if true, not meaningful. Thus, scientism is either false or meaningless.

“In the weak sense, scientism is the view that the methods of the natural sciences should be applied to any subject matter. This view is summed up nicely by Michael Shermer:

“Scientism is a scientific worldview that encompasses natural explanations for all phenomena, eschews supernatural and paranormal speculations, and embraces empiricism and reason as the twin pillars of a philosophy of life appropriate for an Age of Science (Shermer 2002).”

“It is no more heretical to say the Universe displays purpose, as Hoyle has done, than to say that it is pointless, as Steven Weinberg has done. Both statements are metaphysical and outside science. Yet it seems that scientists are permitted by their own colleagues to say metaphysical things about lack of purpose and not the reverse. This suggests to me that science, in allowing this metaphysical notion, sees itself as religion and presumably as an atheistic religion (if you can have such a thing).”

(From: Shallis, M., In the eye of a storm, “New Scientist,” pp. 42-43, January 19, 1984.)

The assertion that “Scientists who fudge their results … are always challenged and disgraced” is unobservable and untestable and therefore easy to make. Every field of human endeavor — politics, religion, art, etc. — has been corrupted in one way or another, yet somehow “science” is immune; people have been so conditioned by scientism to believe that what “scientists” say must be the truth that when anyone challenges the current paradigm he’s
excommunicated from the land of the living. Groupthink is required; independent thought is heresy.

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